Why has NPR stopped using Twitter? Is National Public Radio “state-affiliated media”?

National Public Radio, more commonly referred to as NPR, has decided to leave Twitter after receiving the “state-affiliated media” tag, which was then changed to “government-funded media.”

NPR rejects label as “state-affiliated media”

Leaders and journalists at NPR, as well as fans of their coverage, were angered by the implication that the outlet was not independent of the US federal government. On Wednesday, NPR posted on its website that it “will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform.”

Since the article announcing its departure from the Bird app, NPR has only tweeted links to its other social media platforms and a link for those interested to subscribe to its newsletter.

The decision to leave is directly connected to Twitter’s decision to add that “state-affiliated media” tag to NPR’s account. NPR views the decision as a way to discredit the organization’s reporting, noting in the article that the only other outlets to receive the label were “propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.”

After pushback from NPR journalists, and other major media outlets, Twitter CEO allowed the tag to be changed to “government-funded,” but even that the outlet calls “inaccurate and misleading.” NPR officials have stressed the fact that the outlet “is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence” and that “less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

NPR CEO John Lansing has defended the decision to leave Twitter by saying that he “would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.” The British Broadcasting Company, or BBC, is staged as “publicly funded,” and when Musk was asked by the British outlet whether a similar tag would be applied to NPR, he said he was considering it. However, for Lansing, trust in Twitter has been lost, and even if the change was made, the NPR CEO made it clear that his news organization would not begin posting again anytime soon.

Is National Public Radio “state-affiliated media”?

There is no clear answer to this question since the discussion has been politicized to such a large degree.

Some members of the GOP, who have long blasted NPR as liberal and biased, applauded the move to label the content as “state-affiliated.” However, those same Republicans have the same criticism for outlets like CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream news organizations. These other outlets are not state-affiliated or publicly funded, and their coverage is not so different from that of NPRs. For critics of corporate media, like reader-funded writer Caitlin Johnstone it is not NPR’s funding that opens their coverage up to criticism. Instead, it is the fact that the coverage from CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and even Fox News often parrots partisan, bipartisan, and corporate talking points that cast doubt on claims of independence.

Currently, Twitter is playing political games with which organizations are labeled. It is hard to argue that any inconsistencies in the distribution of the tags improve audience awareness as to the possible bias they might find in an outlet’s reporting. What is interesting is that some state-affiliated news outlets the US government funds, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, are not being tagged. This fact led many to believe that Musk’s decision to target NPR was purely political since other lesser-known organizations were not slapped with the same designation. Johnstone has called Twitter out for their lack of consistency and for responding to backlash from US media by establishing “a special new designation to separate western propaganda outlets from the media of empire-targeted governments.”

Radio Free Europe, according to its own website, “is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the U.S. Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) as a private grantee.” This is a convoluted way to say that the outlet is “private” but funded by the Congress, with its editorial independence “protected by US law.” The government justifies the existence of the outlet saying that it operates “in countries where a free press is threatened, and disinformation is pervasive.” Compared to NPR, the funding and relationship to the US government is much more direct, yet Musk does not feel the need to inform viewers of the outlet’s content on Twitter.